Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to shared document management and more particularly to shared document management and storage for enterprise group collaboration documents.
Background Description
Social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace, have become ubiquitous. Enterprises, especially large enterprises such as large, multinational corporations, are adapting closed (internal) social networking to different contexts within the particular enterprise. These enterprise social networks can improve co-worker relationships in, and across, different enterprise divides or groups, e.g., departments, sites, and/or country borders. Using a closed social network enterprise workers can connect with, and join with, other worker members for collaborating and sharing ideas, internal documents and information. Social network users (e.g., enterprise management and workers) can form groups of project team members for each project to facilitate project intercommunication. Similarly, users can form other ad hoc communities, work related or common interest, e.g., company sports teams or other after-work activities.
Within these groups, group members can create activity streams, upload/download and share documents. On a typical project, members may update shared documents, frequently. Disseminating updates, multiple times, is critical for improved organization-wide collaboration and coordination. Typically, however, with each update old versions may become irrelevant. However, users seldom erase old versions as new versions become available. Further, occasionally, there may be a need to refer to, or even backtrack and undo, recent updates. Thus, it may be desirable to keep some number of old versions. Depending on the number of collaborators on a particular document, however, the overhead for maintaining several different versions of the same document, on several different user machines, may be inordinately high. While collecting all of different versions on dedicated, central storage might reduce this overhead, this also requires dedicated storage that is sufficiently elastic to match an increasing/expanding amount of data. Unfortunately, the expense of providing sufficient dedicated local or cloud storage to guarantee availability and reliability may be prohibitive. Public cloud storage, for example, may be sufficient to store the data, but data privacy is an issue with typical public clouds.
Furthermore, enterprises are fluid entities with employees and employee responsibilities fluid or changing. Changes in employees and associated responsibilities frequently changes enterprise group membership. For an example, existing projects may add newly hires or transfers. Likewise employees may leave the projects over time, e.g., when someone quits, gets fired, transfers or receives a promotion. These employee changes change projects members and member relationships and, as a result, social network group membership. In addition, a typical project may change due to its dynamic nature, or because of widely varying activity with highly active peak periods, demarcated by lull periods of little activity. Also, as a project winds down and ends, the associated community may retain interests and responsibilities. Typical storage systems providing storage capability for enterprise groups require a significant effort and resulting overhead (i.e., expense) to accommodate this fluidity.
Thus, there is a need for reducing enterprise collaboration data storage overhead, and for consolidating collaboration data handling; and more particularly, for reducing the volume of redundant data collected, as well as stale data collecting, and stored in enterprise-wide collaborative projects.